How did we come to live in the era of "the chair"?

Teenage taboos, hosted by Karima Kawah and edited by Mais Baqi.

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There is no single obvious reason why so many chairs have suddenly appeared in the world. It is caused by a confluence of factors such as prevailing customs, fashions, existing political conditions, changing work habits and behaviors, as well as the intense desire to get as much rest as possible.

This last factor does not need any explanation or clarification, especially as it falls within the framework of a culture in which the enjoyment of comfort and luxury is one of the strongest motives influencing the consumer during the process of making his purchasing decisions.

While chairs began to appear in slightly greater numbers in what is known as the Early Modern period between 1500 and 1800, they seem to have become more widespread and popular during the Industrial Revolution.

Although it was relatively easy in the period before the eighteenth century to acquire a chair; It had little use for the majority of the world's population at that time. Even today, it is not easy for a person to sit for long periods of time on an unpadded, hard wooden chair, like the type that was prevalent in that era.

As for the upholstered chairs, they were also very expensive at the time. But the fondness for a new trend represented in what has been called the "culture of sitting relaxed", which emanated from the French royal court in the eighteenth century and spread to other parts of the world, helped make the use of the chair in this early period in the history of our relationship with it more common and widespread. .

During the centuries before that, chairs were constantly associated with concepts such as strength, power, wealth, and exalted status. It went as far as being used by the people of the countryside with reverence, as if it were the crown that was placed on the heads of kings and rulers.

If we read the "First Folio" - a collection of plays by the famous English poet William Shakespeare published in 1623 - we will find a reference on the margin of one of the pages of the play "King Lear", regarding the movement required of the actors on stage, indicating that the king will enter into a scene Carried on the shoulders of a group of servants, he is seated on a 'chair'. Chairs are still considered a symbol of high status until now. The highest rank in my academic field is called a "chair professor".

In English, the word 'chair' - which can be translated as 'chairman' - is used to refer to a person who directs a meeting, and the head of a company is also called 'chairwoma' or 'chairwoma', meaning boss. Moreover, it is an internationally acknowledged fact that the best chair in any office building always belongs to the chief of staff.

As the use of chairs became more democratic (especially after the French Revolution and the great reform laws enacted in Britain in 1832), this was accompanied by a slow change in our working patterns. Most of the work done in the Victorian era was defined as either manual work or done within the walls of factories.

However, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the labor market began to change in turn, in light of the acceleration of the second wave of the technological revolution. Among the inventions that emerged in the midst of this wave were innovations such as the typewriter, sending telegrams by telegraph, and the expansion of the use of electricity.

The new category of professionals, which has come to be called "office clerks", has also become the fastest growing among the various other occupational categories during the latter half of that period. A census taken in 1851 indicated that the number of people performing administrative work was just under 44,000. Two decades later, the number of people who perform their work sitting most or all of the time is about 91,000, an increase of more than double.

Now that last category of professionals is in the majority. Across the various decades of the twentieth century, a forest of other activities – often or always performed in a sitting position – has grown around us to fit the new nature of our lives in the workplace.

If we go back to the nineteenth century, we will find that it witnessed a great and steady increase in the popularity of a habit such as reading novels. This was followed by the emergence of more forms of entertainment and entertainment associated with sitting on benches and chairs due to the invention of cinema, radio and television.

More recently, activities such as playing computer games, watching live broadcasts through various electronic devices - and other activities that occur while sitting in front of a screen - have led us to sit still, as if we are in a state of meditation or thinking. From this point of view, the person of the "Anthropocene" era has become in need of chairs to carry out all these "activities".

Thus, if modern life offers us a "bundle" of behaviors that depend on sitting most of the time, if not all, then the chairs are the "legs" on which this package depends. Its existence is absolutely necessary, in order for one to be able to live a modern life, and the greater part of what we practice in it would seem unimaginable without it.

According to research conducted by the British Heart Foundation, which is concerned with heart health in Britain, we spend up to nine and a half hours a day sitting. This means that a modern person spends 75 percent of his time without physical activity, which leads to a number of problems.

The health of our hard, soft or soft tissues can, due to the negative impact of lack of motor activities, become so bad that it is appropriate to cite the saying “the part that you do not use atrophies”.

The muscles and bones are affected negatively or positively by increasing the load on them or stopping their use, so that the bones become more dense or fragile, and the muscle strength increases or weakens.

Therefore, sitting for a very long time in a position in which most of our back muscles are far from each other, back pain is the main cause of disability worldwide, especially since the condition of the spine in each of us is so weak, due to all factors previous.

While we now have an environment that we call the "anthropocene environment", indicating that it was affected and shaped by what humans have done on the surface of the earth, we may be able to equally classify ourselves as humans of the "Anthropocene" era as well.

While people in the Paleolithic era died most of their lives during childhood, and violence and injury were common reasons for their death in later stages of life, the situation is different with their modern descendants, who often die due to metabolic disorders, such as suffering Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and some types of cancer. All of the above is strongly associated with inactivity, i.e. using chairs to sit on.

In 2012, a study was conducted to investigate the effects of inactivity. The authors compared behavioral data collected from 7,813 women, finding that those who sat for 10 hours a day had shorter telomeres.

A telomere, or telomere, is a region in the cells of the human body whose length or shortness indicates how old these cells are. The study indicated that life habits that involved sitting for a long time led to an increase in the biological age of these women by approximately eight years from their actual age.

In fact, some studies indicate that a little exercise is not effective in repairing the damage caused by sitting for long periods, and the negative effects that occur because of it.

These and other studies attest to the fact that we need to think twice about continuing to devote more time and effort to our relatively recent and passionate love affair with chairs.